How to Use Meme Marketing to Grow Faster
According to Google, a meme is an image, a video, or piece of text typically humorous in nature that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users often with slight variations.
On an average day, a regular person spends around an hour and a half on social media. Memes are the language used by people on social media to share new ideas and feelings.
Because of this, it’s not surprising that memes have become tremendously popular in our culture. You might know about Grumpy Cat, Good Guy Greg (GGG), and LOLcats — these are all characters from memes that are now a big part of the internet and meme culture and have been used in different ways to spread all sorts of ideas.
Using memes to market things can bring a fresh approach to how you use social media. Memes are all about pictures, which makes them a great way to create posts for social media and add to your content online.
The coolest thing about meme marketing is that you can just take an idea that’s already popular and use its fame to help you share what you want.
My favorite recent marketing meme is a picture of Liam Neeson on the phone with the caption…
I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE
But you visited my site once, so now I will find you,
and then find you again, and again, and again…
Memes are popular because they’re funny and relatable. Laughter is scientifically proven to be contagious, so it only makes sense why memes are shared so often.
Here’s the key to growing your business using memes, and where most people get it wrong. You might think that if you use memes on social media, that it won’t generate customers or make sales. And initially that’s true. Few if any customers are going to see your meme and then race over to your sales page to buy your product.
But if you post memes that are directly related to your industry, then you will start building up your follower counts. Notice I said, “directly related to your industry.” Sharing any old silly meme isn’t going to work because it will just confuse people.
But if your business is website optimization for example, and you post a meme that shows a grumpy old man with the caption, “Knows his prospects are looking for his business online, refuses to make it easy for them to find him,” then you’re targeting your audience.
Posting memes that speak to your prospects gets those prospects to start following you and sharing those memes with other potential prospects. And because your follower count is going up, your regular content will get more engagement as it’s posted, and a small percentage of them will convert into subscribers and even customers.
As you keep posting relevant memes over time, that small percentage starts adding up. The key is to continue posting your normal content as well to help you build relationships with those new followers and then start converting some of them into customers.
Don’t fall into the trap of posting memes that aren’t relevant to your business. If you do, you’ll get followers who don’t engage with your regular content and that can cause problems over time. If a social media platform sees that people aren’t engaging with your regular posts, then they’re not going to be showing those posts to your followers.
Creating memes is fairly simple. Use a free program such as Canva or Adobe https://www.adobe.com/express/create/meme, or hire someone on Fiverr to create memes for you.
Use easy-to-read fonts, choose an image that helps convey your meaning and try it out on a few friends or colleagues before posting it to social media.
Really, using memes for marketing feels almost like play time. It’s fun, enjoyable, a bit silly and in the long run makes good marketing sense.